Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.
Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.
The Role
Cedar is seeking an AI Engineer/Applied Scientist III to join our Support/Kora squad. In this role, you will design, build, and optimize Kora, an AI Voice Agent, purpose-built for patient billing and the central product in Cedar’s Support offering.
Your day-to-day work centers on prompt engineering, conversation flow design, and context optimization, not training models from scratch. You’ll use foundation model APIs and agent SDK platforms to craft AI behaviors that help patients understand and resolve their bills over the phone. You’ll combine rigorous data analysis (e.g., reviewing call transcripts and patient account data) with production-level coding to ship improvements that make a measurable difference for real patients and healthcare providers.
Responsibilities
- Design and optimize Kora’s behavior, including prompt engineering, context window design, and conversation flow architecture, to help patients understand and resolve billing issues over the phone
- Implement your solutions in production code (Python and TypeScript), leveraging AI coding assistants as part of your toolkit
- Design robust experiment plans that deconstruct large goals into small testable hypotheses. Execute these plans through iterative development cycles where you ship new features, evaluate how your features work with real patients, and continue to improve and optimize Kora’s behavior, displaying a strong ownership mentality, product mindset, and user experience focus
- Analyze unstructured data, call transcripts, patient account details, conversation logs, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify patterns and improve agent performance
- Partner closely with other scientists, engineers, designers, and product counterparts to solve problems as a team
A Note on This Role:
This is not an ML modeling role. You won’t train models from scratch, but will work with foundation model APIs and agent platforms. It’s also not pure software engineering: rather than building to pre-defined specs, you’ll design experiments, test hypotheses, and iterate based on real user behavior. We’re looking for someone who works across boundaries, combining engineering, data science, and product thinking.
Skills and Experience
- 3 or more years of full-time experience working in a structured product development environment on a product that had frequent releases
- Hands-on experience with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) and/or AI agent frameworks — including prompt engineering, context management, and evaluation
- Experience with modern programming languages (in this role, you’ll use both Python and TypeScript), as well as experience with AI-enabled coding
- A strong understanding of both the scientific method and software engineering principles, with a proven ability to balance experimental rigor and rapid production deployment
- Experience collaborating with partners from different job functions, and the ability to translate business requirements into technical builds
- Ability to thrive in an entrepreneurial environment, showing a tendency toward speed and action while achieving clarity from ambiguity
Nice to Have:
- Experience with conversational AI voice agents
- A track record of transforming raw, unstructured data sources into actionable intelligence
- Experience in healthcare, healthtech, or other regulated domains
- Salary/Hourly Rate Range*: $170,000 - $215,000
- This role is equity eligible
- This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package
#LI-Remote #LI-JJ2
What do we offer to the ideal candidate?
- A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
- Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
- For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
- 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
- Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians)
- Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
- Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
- Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally
About us
Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. "Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.
What the Team is Saying
Cedar Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Parental & Family Support — Policies include fertility and family-forming support and fully paid parental leave for new parents, positioned as a core strength of the package.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off is structured as unlimited PTO covering vacation, sick time and mental health, paired with remote-friendly flexibility.
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Healthcare Strength — Coverage includes multiple medical, dental and vision plan options alongside mental-health and well-being resources.
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What We Do
Cedar is the AI-powered healthcare financial experience platform, built for the rising cost and complexity of healthcare payments. We help millions of people every year understand and resolve their medical bills with clarity and compassion, while helping healthcare organizations operate more efficiently. We’re combining AI, smart design, and empathy to fix one of healthcare’s most urgent crises.
Why Work With Us
Built on over a billion patient interactions, our platform unifies billing, payments, coverage, and support into one intelligent solution that learns and adapts, delivering stronger results for providers and more empathetic, affordable experiences for patients. We co-innovate with healthcare leaders to make care more accessible and affordable.
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Employees work remotely.
Cedar has adopted a hybrid work model that enables all Cedarians to work in a way that best serves them. For some, that means working from our NYC HQ. Most, (two-thirds) of our employees work remotely and only come to our office for team on-sites
